It
is almost exactly ten years since I came to the United States from Britain,
and exactly seven since I came to Rochester as Director of the Program
in Visual and Cultural Studies. It is time to reflect on my complicated
relationship to the discipline of sociology. And when I say that it is
time, I don't mean this biographically, but more in relation to recent
intellectual developments within both sociology and cultural studies,
as well as to the (mostly) antagonistic relationship between the two,
at least in this country. In my opinion, cultural studies at its best
is sociological. And yet, in the continuing cross-disciplinary
dialogue that has characterized the field of cultural studies in the decade
or so of its progress in the United States, the discipline of sociology
has been notably absent. At the same time, within the field of sociology,
the study of culture has expanded enormously in the last twenty years
among sociologists of culture, and among those who have more recently
been calling themselves 'cultural sociologists,' which is not the same
thing. Some of these sociologists have themselves adopted the term "cultural
studies" to describe their work, thereby both claiming (mistakenly, as
I shall suggest) to have pre-empted the newer field, and ignoring the
possibility of a productive encounter with cultural studies in general
and with related developments in the study of culture in the humanities.
Within the past couple of years, this has begun to change, and I will
be reviewing some of the newer work that begins to bridge the hitherto
radical divide between sociology and cultural studies. My primary intention
here is to point to the advantages that will ensue if sociologists enter
into the interdisciplinary dialogue that constitutes the ever-changing
field of cultural studies.

Sociologists in the Humanities

Before I came to the United
States, I taught for thirteen years in a department of sociology in Britain.
My geographical move also entailed an apparent change of disciplines and,given
the nature of the academy in Britain and the United States, also a change
of academic divisions, from the social sciences to the humanities. But
the change was only apparent, except in the material sense of my
institutional location. My work didn't change radically (though I hope
it has developed in the past decade). I did not re-train, or take another
Ph.D. Again, this biographical fact is interesting, I think, not for its
own sake, but because of what it says about the organization of disciplines
in Britain and the United States, and about the study of culture in the
late twentieth century. There are a number of issues here. First, given
my background and training in European sociology and my involvement in
interdisciplinary work, I don't think many departments of sociology in
this country would have been prepared to give me a home. The discipline
here has remained resolutely intradisciplinary as a collective
project; moreover, it has manifested a strong attachment (in some cases
a growing one) to positivistic scholarship, including quantitative and
mathematical methods. For the most part, this has also been largely true
of that sub-specialization called the sociology of culture, most of whose
practitioners continue to operate with untheorized and unexamined categories
of social analysis. Second, new emphases have emerged in the humanities,
which have invited certain sociological perspectives: new historicism,
the new art history, post-colonial and feminist approaches to literature
and culture, and so on. And thirdly, the success and proliferation of
cultural studies in the U.S., in academic programs and in publishing has
provided new opportunities for such cross-departmental moves. Given my
alienation from American sociology, my life-long interest in the study
of culture, and the hospitality of the humanities, my current situation
makes plenty of sense. Nor is my own change of disciplinary home unique.
Simon Frith, delivering his inaugural lecture as Professor of English
at the University of Strathclyde, opened his talk in this way:

I ought to begin by saying
that I am honoured to be giving this lecture, and indeed I am, but I
have to confess that my dominant emotion is surprise. I haven't studied
English formally since I did O levels, and I still find it a peculiar
turn of events that I should now be a professor of English. My academic
training was in sociology, and I'm tempted to treat this lecture as
a sociological case study: what does it tell us about the present state
of English studies that a sociologist can chair an English department?1

Nevertheless, I suppose I
have felt since coming to Rochester that my "mission" was to encourage
a "sociological imagination"2
among students in the graduate program in Rochester, a program, after
all, initially founded by the collaboration of colleagues in art history,
film studies, and comparative literature, only more recently including
the participation of colleagues from anthropology and history. (There
is no longer a department of sociology at the University.) I have wanted
to direct them to the texts and methods of sociology and social history,
and to urge them to supplement their interpretative and critical readings
of visual texts with attention to the institutional and social processes
of cultural production and consumption. It was a very pleasant moment
for me recently when a graduate student, who came to discuss his search
for a useful concept of "style," told me that he had been reading Max
Weber, and said (without any prompting) before he left my office "I suppose
I should look at Simmel's work." Earlier, I was delighted when a graduate
student (now a faculty member at the University of Virginia) completely
switched his dissertation topic and ended up writing a social and institutional
(and, of course, critical) history of art education in the United Statesa
dissertation, by the way, that will be published next year by the University
of California Press.3 Actually
this last case was particularly interesting because a year earlier (my
first year in Rochester) this student had taken a class with me on the
sociology of culture in which I had devoted quite a bit of time to the
work of American sociologists. Despite my strong reservations about this
work, I wanted students to recognize the importance of paying attention
to institutional processes and structures in the study of culture. Some
members of the class (including him) complained that this work was boring
(which, actually, much of it is). Moreover, given my own criticisms of
the work, which I explained, they wondered why we were spending time on
it. I did not have a very good answer, except to say that nobody else
was doing this kind of work well, and that I had hoped that we could read
it critically in order to consider how we might indeed investigate what
sociologists call "the production of culture." As it turned out, that
is indeed what that graduate student did, incorporating what he found
most useful in that tradition into a fine study whose intellectual influences
were at the same time more wide-ranging and sophisticated.

Sociology in Cultural Studies

In this essay, I want to
suggest that cultural studies can benefit from a stronger connection with
sociology. A good deal of what I have to say consists of a critical review
of recent developments in sociology, a discipline which for the most part
has still not come to terms with the fact that, as Avery Gordon has put
it, "the real itself and its ethnographic or sociological representations
are . . . fictions, albeit powerful ones that we do not experience as
fictions but as true."4 I review
this work not so that I can simply dismiss it, but because, first, it
retains a very high profile in the study of culture within the discipline
of sociology and, second, because, as I shall show, it makes claims either
to supersede or to displace cultural studies. (I should point out here,
though, that there are other branches of sociology, less visible and less
influential, that offer more promising approaches to the field, especially
work influenced by the Frankfurt School.)5
My critique of trends in sociology is entirely motivated by my hope for
a productive encounter between cultural studies and sociology. The benefit
to both fields will be the mutual recognition thatagain to quote
Avery Gordon ñ"the increasingly sophisticated understandings of representation
and of how the social world is textually or discursively constructed still
require an engagement with the social structuring practices that have
long been the province of sociological inquiry."6
What sociologists can contribute to the project of cultural analysis is
a focus on institutions and social relations, as well as on the broader
perspective of structured axes of social differentiation and their historical
transformationsaxes of class, status, gender, nationality, and ethnicity.
You don't, of course, have to be a sociologist to pay attention to these
analytic dimensions, and there are certainly cultural studies scholars
who do just this kind of work. (Stuart Hall, Tony Bennett and Angela McRobbie
come to mind.) My suggestion, rather, is that the fact that such questions
constitute the raison d'être of sociology is enough reason
to want sociologists to contribute to the debate about the study of culture.

Let me give an example from my
own work that illustrates how it has happened that I have been led back
to my old discipline, sometimes against my own expectations. This relates
to an exhibition I had planned to curate a couple of years ago. The fact
that the exhibition didn't take place in the end was, for me, as interesting
as the material I explored in researching my proposal. I was invited by
the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to propose an exhibition
for the series "Collection in Context." These small, one-room shows have
had very varied themes, and have in common only the fact that their focus
is a work, or works, from the collection. Examples of exhibitions in the
series include Edward Hopper in Paris, Gorky's Betrothals paintings,
works from the year 1952, and the history of the Museum itself, in its
various architectural homes. My proposal was to show the work of women
who were active in the circle around Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the
twenty years leading up to the founding of the Museum in 1931, women who,
though for the most part their names are now not well-known, were rather
high-profile in that period and indeed up to about 1950. They had several
group and one-person shows in the Whitney Studio Club, which preceded
the Museum, and much of their work was owned by the Whitney on its opening,
was shown in the 1931 opening exhibition, and was still prominent in a
1949 exhibition which served as a memorial to Juliana Force, Gertrude
Whitney's assistant and the first director of the Museum. My first assumption
was that I was engaged in the familiar feminist project of retrievalof
the re-presentation of work by women that had been "hidden from history,"
as a result of the by now well-known joint effects of selective art criticism,
art history, and museum practices. It turned out that a sociology of cultural
production served me much better than this 1970s feminist model in understanding
both the contemporary success and the consequent disappearance from view
of these women artists. About a third of all the work shown and bought
by Force and Whitney was by women, and there is little evidence that women
artists fared worse than men in terms of exhibition. Access to this exposure
was, above all else, a function of a particular (realist and figurative)
aesthetic, and membership of particular social groups and networks. These
two factors were related, most of the artists having trained with the
same teachers at the Art Students League in New York, and being products
of some version of Ashcan-style training. Of the twenty or so women artists
I considered, Katharine Schmidt, Dorothy Varian, Nan Watson, Marguerite
Zorach, Peggy Bacon, and Mabel Dwight were among the founder members of
the Whitney Studio Club. Varian, Bacon, Schmidt, Rosella Hartman, and
Lucile Blanch, among others, lived at least part of the time, as did Juliana
Force, in the artists' community in Woodstock, New York. Schmidt, Bacon,
Varian, Molly Luce, and Isabel Bishop trained at the Art Students League.
Schmidt worked as assistant to Juliana Force for several years. Peggy
Bacon was married to the artist, Alexander Brook, who was also assistant
for a while to Force. And Nan Watson was married to the critic Forbes
Watson, who was Juliana Force's lover for twelve years; she also had the
largest number of one-person exhibitions at the Whitney (four), and the
largest number of works owned by the Museum at its opening (eight). Although
there is, of course, a lot more to say about the social relations of production
and exhibition, the point is that I was inevitably led to explore those
social relations as I considered the incidence of work by women, and the
preference for a particular aesthetic.

The ultimate demise of that
aesthetic, and the eventual decision (mine and the Whitney's) not to proceed
with the show, were also best understood in terms of a sociology of aesthetics.
By the 1950s, the Whitney's long-standing commitment to realist art had
been definitively superseded by what we might call the MoMA orthodoxythe
preference for European modernism. (The consequences for realist artists
affected men as well as women; the work of Alexander Brook, Yasuo Kuniyoshi,
and Guy Pène du Bois is as little known as that of their female
counterparts in the Whitney circle.) As is well known, for example from
debates and confrontations in the 1970s, the Whitney since then has operated
centrally within a modernist aesthetic (and, more recently, a postmodernist
one). It was, finally, an "aesthetic" judgement that undermined the possibility
of the exhibition, since it was deemed that the work I planned to exhibit
was not "good" enough to show. Looking back on that decision, I can now
see that my acquiescence in that assessment was as much a product of my
own modernist prejudices as anything. (An interesting double coda to the
story is that, first, the Whitney did mount a version of that showworks
on paper by the same women artists, but shown in their more marginal gallery
at Champion, Connecticutand, second, that since last year the Whitney
has shown signs of taking its own figurative tradition and holdings more
seriously, particularly after a major show there last year of American
art as seen and curated by British curators from the Tate Galleryas
The New Yorker put it, "American art viewed through eyes used to
looking at Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud."7)

"Sociologically Impoverished"
Cultural Studies

My summary of this historical
movement has been necessarily rather sketchy, but I hope that the point
is clear. In the case of the Whitney, the rise and decline (and possible
revival) of a particular aesthetic has everything to do with institutional
practices and social relations. (It also has everything to do with how
one might read competing visual representations, which I have not addressed
in this brief summary.) I am suggesting that the sociological perspective
is invaluable in directing attention to certain critical aspects in the
production of culture. As I said earlier, I am well aware that it is not
only sociologists who are equipped to undertake this kind of work. For
example, the focus on the ideology and practices of the museum has been
prominent in some important work in recent years in what is usually called
"museology" or "museum studies," most of it done by people who are not
trained in sociology. But my concern to see sociology figure more centrally
in visual studies, and in cultural studies more generally, is expressed
in a context in which institutional and social issues are too often ignored,
and in which, as Steven Seidman has put it, the social is often "textualized."8
A lot has been written about the "Americanization of cultural studies,"
much of this writing critical of the trend.9
Some writers object to what they perceive as a depoliticization of the
project in its move from Britain (and originally, of course, the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham) to
the United Statesits detachment from social movements and its increasingly
professionalized and rarefied life in the academy. Others, noting that
the proliferation of cultural studies scholarship and teaching through
the 1980s and 1990s has been largely (though not solely) in humanities
departments, especially departments of English and Comparative Literature,
identify an abandonment of the more sociological approach that understands
culture in terms of axes of stratification and inequality (primarily class
relations in the early years of the Birmingham Centre, but later also
relations of gender and race). Cary Nelson, in one of the more impassioned
critiques of this trend, describes American cultural studies as a kind
of textualisma set of ingenious, and perhaps politically-informed,
new readings of texts, but readings that are ultimately ungrounded, arbitrary,
and shallow.10 In a recent
article, the sociologist Michael Schudson makes a similar point through
a careful and serious analysis of what he takes as a paradigmatic text
in American cultural studiesDonna Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy."11
Haraway's paper, which, as Schudson says, has been much admired, and reprinted
more than once, is a study of the American Museum of Natural History in
New York City, and specifically its African Hall. She "reads" the African
Hall, its taxidermy and its dioramas, in terms of its genesis in the 1930s,
focusing on the key role of its designer, the taxidermist Carl Akeley,
whose activities as explorer, hunter, and designer of museum "habitat
groups" are discussed at some length. She also notes that the Second International
Congress of Eugenics was held at the Museum in 1921 (though Akeley was
not present at the time). Her interpretation of the African Hall, and
of the Museum itself, is in terms of race, sex and class in New York City.
(Of course I cannot do justice to her long and complex discussion here.)
Schudson attacks the piece on a number of grounds.12
First, he challenges key factual points in her argument (arguing, for
example, that the 1921 eugenics conference was not indicative of anything
significant, either at the Museum or in New York in general, since, as
he points out, the following conference, in 1932, attracted less than
100 people, and the Museum is, in any case, more closely associated with
the anthropologist Franz Boas, who opposed the eugenics movement). Second,
he takes issue with the logic of her paper, especially her use of conversion
by synecdoche to link display, ideology, and politics. (The logic, briefly,
is that African Hall stands for the Museum; the meaning of the Hall lies
in the original plans for it; and the African Hall in 1921 or 1926 represents
the unaltered meaning of the Hall.) These links, he argues, are ultimately
quite arbitrary. And this is related to his third objection, which is
that Haraway's essay is a study in interpretation whose superficial use
of sociology allows her to ignore "how real people read museums" and "what
meaning actual visitors take from African Hall or the museum generally."13
Here, I think, he is not insisting on ethnographic studies of visitors,
but rather on the careful historical and social placement of the moments
and artifacts she selects for analysis. (He offers a parodic equivalent
to this kind of reasoning, in which New York University is essentially
fascista logic which works through synecdoche whereby the Elmer
Holmes Bobst Library stands for the University, and its architect, Philip
Johnson, at one time a fascist sympathizer, stands for the Library)14

Poststructuralist Sociology

Schudson's general point
is that contemporary cultural studies is "sociologically impoverished,"
to its detriment. Although he is not himself particularly devoted to the
Birmingham tradition in his own work, which is in the field of media studies,
he concludes with the prediction that "the works of cultural studies that
will last will be the sort that follow Williams and Hoggart and Thompson,
in close attention to lived experience."15
This invocation of the "founding fathers" of British cultural studies
reminds us that, despite the particular disciplinary affiliations of these
writers (literature and history), Birmingham cultural studies was firmly
grounded in sociologyin the texts of Weber, Marx, Mannheim, the
symbolic interactionists and other sociological and ethnographic traditions.16
Throughout its theoretical transformationsits continuing revisions
of neo-Marxist thought through the work of Althusser, Gramsci and the
Frankfurt School, its radical re-thinking of its critical and conceptual
framework in response to feminism and ethnic studies, and its rapprochement
with poststructuralism"Birmingham" work retained its primary focus
on the structures of social life. Let me be clear, though, that I am emphatically
not recommending a return to origins, or an uncritical resumption
of a pre-critical sociology. The critique of the early Birmingham model
from the point of view of poststructuralist theory, first made, famously,
by Rosalind Coward in an article in Screen in 1977, has been definitive.17
In short, a sociological model that takes categories of "class" and "gender"
as unproblematically given, and that reads cultural activities
and products as expressions of class (and other) positions, is
revealed as fundamentally determinist and theoretically naïve. As
Coward shows, cultural studies must address questions of representation,
signification, and the nature of the subject if it is to deal adequately
with its chosen field.18 But
this poststructuralist turn in cultural studies, which renders at least
problematic any talk of 'real' social relations, can be taken as opening
the way to exactly that kind of cultural studies rejected by Nelson, Schudson
and othersnamely the interpretation of cultural practices undertaken
without a grounding in identifiable social categories. Once we acknowledge
that those social categories (class, race, gender, and so on) are themselves
discursive constructs, historically changing articulations, and, ultimately,
no more than heuristic devices in analysis (and, of course, in political
mobilization) then where is that solidity of the social world on which
a cultural studies that is not "purely textual" can depend?

In my view, this necessary
re-thinking of the sociological project does not translate into license
for "wild interpretation." Indeed, in the past few years there have been
encouraging signs within the discipline of a determination to engage with
critical theory in the humanities and in cultural studies. Two sociology
journals have devoted special issues to the subject of "postmodernism"Sociological
Theory in 1991 and Theory and Society in 1992.19
A 1995 conference at the University of California in Davis, celebrating
the twentieth anniversary of the journal Theory and Society, whose
theme was "Interpreting Historical Change at the End of the Twentieth
Century: The Challenges of the Present Age to Historical Thought and Social
Theory," was notable for an interdisciplinary group of speakers, though
mostly from within the social sciences. Some of the papers were informed
by contemporary cultural and poststructuralist theory, and although this
inevitably meant a dialogue of incomprehension (sometimes hostility) from
time to time the very possibility of such a debate at a sociology conference
was something new.20 One speaker,
the historian John Toews, had published an important article on the practice
of intellectual history after the linguistic turn, which has already provoked
debate about the nature of social science in the light of poststructuralism.21
Another participant, historian William Sewell, is the author of an equally
important essay, which, as he summarizes it, "attempts to develop a theory
of structure that restores human agency to social actors, builds the possibility
of change into the concept of structure, and overcomes the divide between
the semiotic and materialist visions of structure."22
This 1992 article, published in the mainstream American Journal of
Sociology, together with his more recent work (for example, a paper
on the concept of "culture" delivered at last year's ASA meetings), while
not itself an example of a poststructuralist sociology, nevertheless begins
the task of reconceptualizing such key sociological terms as "structure"
and "culture" in ways partly informed by, and hence hospitable to, poststructuralist
theory.

A conference at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, organized in February 1997 by two sociologists,
was designed explicitly to address the impact of cultural studies and
theory in the humanities on "cultural sociology." Although not all the
papers took on this particular invitation, the conference's two-paragraph
rationale foregrounded the need for sociologists to take account of "new
interpretive approaches in the humanities,"referring to deconstruction,
anti-foundational thinking, and "sites of representation and discourse."23
The conference was entitled "The Cultural Turn Conference," and although,
as I will show in a moment, we find this term used by sociologists to
mean simply a switch of focus from institutional and structural features
of society to the study of culture, in this case it has the additional
meaning, indicated in its published rationale, of what we might call "taking
poststructuralism seriously." In this, it is used more or less synonymously
with "the linguistic turn" and the "semiotic turn."

A few months ago, Blackwell
published a book edited by the sociologist Elizabeth Long, and sponsored
by the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association,
under the title From Sociology to Cultural Studies. Contributors
include cultural studies scholarsRichard Johnson, Andrew Goodwin,
Tricia Rose, George Lipsitzas well as sociologists and anthropologists
whose work is based in cultural studiesHerman Gray, George Marcus,
Jon Cruz. The editor's introduction reviews developments in British and
American cultural studies and in critical theory in the humanities, as
well as in the sociology of culture, and asserts her intention, with this
volume, of facilitating the dialogue across these fields. Sociologist
Steven Seidman proposes the "relativization" of sociology by its encounter
with cultural studies (for him, primarily the Birmingham tradition, and
including its own "semiotic turn" and its turn to psychoanalysis). Such
a relativized sociology would, in his opinion, have a theory of the subject
and of subjectivity, a critical-moral role that rejects the traditional
sociological standpoint of value-neutrality, and, as a result, "more productive
ways of handling problems or concerns which are considered important by
some American sociologists, e.g. relating social structure and culture,
meaning and power, agency and constraint, or articulating a stronger notion
of culture."24 Other contributors
take Elizabeth Long's invitation to contribute to the book as the opportunity
to stress the other side of the relationshipcultural studies' need
for a firmer sociological grounding. (Michael Schudson's critique of Haraway,
which I referred to earlier, and which appears in the book, is one example
of this. Richard Johnson makes the same point, in his article on "reinventing
cultural studies.")25 But of
the seventeen contributors, almost all of them have, as Long points out
in her introduction, "minimized territorial bickering" and have engaged
seriously in the work at the intersection of sociology, the humanities,
and cultural studies.26

The Sociology of Culture

These developments, though,
are occurring on the margins of the discipline of sociology (Long's book
remains atypical in the field,) and I am not especially optimistic about
either a more extensive re-evaluation of the field or a more widespread
enthusiasm among sociologists to engage in cross-disciplinary dialogue.
I want to consider in particular two branches of sociology, both relevant
to the study of culture, and each indifferent or hostile to cultural studies.
Since between them these two fields account for most of the sociological
work on culture, I believe it is important to look closely at their practices
and assumptions. The first is the sociology of culture, or the sociology
of the arts. This sub-specialization has gone from strength to strength
in the past two decades, now constituting one of the largest sections
in the American Sociological Association. At last year's annual meetings,
the Culture section merited five sessions and fifteen roundtables, on
the basis of membership numbers. It has a quarterly newsletter, which
publishes short but often important articles, and it has embarked on a
series of volumes, published by Blackwell, of which the book edited by
Elizabeth Long is the second. This work is represented most strongly by
the study of arts organizations and institutions, known since the mid-l970s
as "the production-of-culture approach." Two special issues of journals
appeared with that title in 1976 and 1978 (American Behavioral Scientist
and Social Research.)27
Although this is not the only model for the sociology of culture, I have
chosen to discuss it since it continues to be prominent in the field.28
Moreover, its limitations are shared by most other work within the sub-discipline.
A typical study, for example, investigates publishers' decision-making
criteria in two commercial publishing houses. Another looks at the role
of the radio and record industries in relation to changes in the world
of country music. A third studies the "gate-keeper" role of two commercial
galleries in the New York art world in the 1950s.29
These examples are all taken from the 1978 volume. But a quick review
of more recent publications, and of conference presentations, confirms
that twenty years later much of the work follows exactly this model. Other
work has taken its departure from Howard Becker's classic essay, "Art
As Collective Action," first published in 1974, and is devoted, like
that essay, to the investigation of the social relations of cultural production,
though in this case not necessarily within one institutionthe roles
of composer, performer, instrument-maker, bureaucrat, fund-raiser, and
so on.30

As I said earlier, most sociologists
of culture and the arts base their work on pre-critical, sometimes positivistic,
premises. The typical methodology is to select for analysis a specific
arts organization (an opera company, an art school, a gallery), identifying
its social hierarchies, its decision-making processes, and, often, the
aesthetic outcomes of these extra-aesthetic factors (though it is rare
that questions of aesthetics are permitted in this discourse, or
indeed any discussion of works themselves).31
But usually the institution is detached from both its social and its historical
context, since the sociologist is dealing with the micro-social sphere.
Ironically, the result is that this work is often both ahistorical and
unsociological. The tenacious social-scientific commitment to "objectivity,"
even in qualitative (rather than quantitative) work, blocks such scholarship
from addressing certain questions of interpretation, representation and
subjectivity. It is instructive to compare contemporary work in museology,
much of it founded on these very questions, with a recent special issue
of a social science journal on the theme of "Museum Research."32
Here are a couple of titles from the volume: "Art Museum Membership and
Cultural Distinction: Relating Members' Perceptions of Prestige to Benefit
Usage;" "The Effect of School-based Arts Instruction on Attendance at
Museums and the Performing Arts;" and "The Impact of Experiential Variables
on Patterns of Museum Attendance." (It is striking, by the way, that even
Bourdieu, whose influence may be detected in a couple of these titles,
can be turned into a tool for empiricismas if he is represented
simply by the tables and correlations in Distinction.33
The complex analysis of cultural taste, in terms of class, habitus, and
cultural capital, and the social critique of the Kantian aesthetic, which
underlie Bourdieu's empirical work, take second place to the enthusiasm
for surveys, number-crunching, and what C. Wright Mills once denounced
as "abstracted empiricism.") One of the more quantitative studies in the
volume considers museum-goers' responses to ninety-four questions about
their social, cultural, and political values and attitudes, using multiple
classification analysis to explore the implications.34
Here it is not so much that the statistical model seems inappropriate
to the subject-matterafter all, interesting correlations can be
found that waybut rather that the categories of analysis are themselves
untheorized.

It is true that some sociologists
of culture have begun to address issues previously ignored as "humanities"
issues, and at least to consider the impact of poststructuralism. The
first Blackwell volume, edited by Diana Crane and published in 1994, starts
with an editor's introduction that at least mentions such theoretical
perspectives. And yet Crane's very formulations make it clear that she
has not got the point. For instance:

French theories, such as semiotics
and poststructuralism, have inspired a greater interest in explicit
or recorded culture. These theories are concerned with the ways in which
texts can shape human behavior and can be used as a source of power
by elites.35

Or:

The change in worldview of
which postmodernism is a symptom has increased the salience of cultural
issues throughout the discipline. Specifically, the emphasis on predictability,
coherence, and consistency which underlies the sociological method in
most fields is being undermined by a new perspective which views culture
as unpredictable, incoherent, and inconsistent.36

One can find other examples of
such awkward, and fundamentally misunderstood, references to theory in
the work of several of the contributors to the volume. The fact that the
editor and three of the contributors cite a famous article by Ann Swidler,
which has had the status of a classic theoretical statement of the sociology
of culture since its publication in 1986, and which recommends conceptualizing
culture as a "tool kit," used by people in constructing "strategies for
action," is another indication of the lingering positivism of the field.37
Interesting, and also relevant, here is a survey of sociology of culture
syllabi undertaken by Diana Crane for the ASA in 1995, which concluded
that, though postmodernism and structuralism/semiotics do appear as categories
on some syllabi, the British cultural studies tradition "remains peripheral
in the Sociology of Culture in the United States."38
The second Blackwell volume, then, From Sociology to Cultural Studies,
appears a rather radical intervention into the sub-specialization of the
sociology of culture, and it will be interesting to see whether it makes
a difference to on-going work in the field. The program for the 1998 ASA
annual meetings, which arrived as I was writing this lecture, does not
indicate much of a change in orientation. There is, in fact, a panel devoted
to "Postmodern Social Theory" (there are 518 panels offered), but it is
not connected to the Sociology of Culture Section, whose own panels appear,
as far as one can tell from a list of titles, to be much the same as usual.

Sociological Theory and "Cultural
sociology"

The second area of sociology
which foregrounds culture is sociological theory itselfthat is,
the theory, or theories, of society. Here in the past couple of years
the term "cultural sociology" has become prominent. But this term, and
its associated reference to "the cultural turn," has nothing at all to
do with language, semiotics, or poststructuralism. It describes a sociological
theory whose central focus is culturehere with the broader meaning
of values, beliefs, ideas, and so on, and not (as in the sociology of
culture) the arts in particular. Cultural sociology, then, might be the
approach employed in other sub-filedsthe sociology of law, the sociology
of education, industrial sociologythat have nothing to do with culture
in the narrower sense.39 The
objective of these sociological theories is to emphasize the centrality
of cultural aspects of everyday life, which they consider have been rendered
secondary to economic, material, structural factors within the discipline.
Several of these authors are fully aware of the tradition of cultural
studies, but they either consider it intellectually inadequate, or maintain
that anything worthwhile to be found in cultural studies was done earlier
(and usually better) by sociologists.40
Note the not-so-subtle adverbs and other indicators of priority in these
examples. A short article in the ASA Culture Newsletter by Michele Lamont,
past Chair of the ASA section on Culture, states:

Of course, the relationship
we have with cultural theory, and with theory more generally, is very
different from that of academics working in Comparative Literature,
English, or History departments. While sociological theory has always
been at the center of our common enterprise, the interest of those scholars
in 'theory'to say nothing of their interest in power, class, etc.has
developed from their relatively recent encounter with European
texts (Foucault, Ricoeur, Derrida, and others).41

And:

We need to painstakingly explain
the place of theory in our field, and how issues that are being appropriated
by New Historicism, New Cultural History, Cultural Studies, and 'Race
Theory' have been conceptualized and studied empirically by sociologists.42

Jeffrey Alexander, a prominent
sociological theorist, employs the term "cultural studies," though not
in a way we might recognize, in order to claim, using the same rhetorical
device, that this is nothing new to sociology, but dates from the classical
sociological tradition, and particularly the work of Emile Durkheim and
his followers: "Both as theory and empirical investigation, poststructuralism
and semiotic investigations more generally can be seen as elaborating
one of the pathways that Durkheim's later sociology opens up."43
And another example is to be found in a collection of essays on the sociological
tradition known as Symbolic Interactionism, an American tradition related
to Pragmatism, and deriving from the work of John Dewey and George Herbert
Mead, which emphasizes, and studies, the construction of meaning and of
the "self" in social interaction. The book, incidentally, is entitled
Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies, though nothing in
it really has anything to do with either the Birmingham tradition or cultural
studies work being done within the humanities in the United States. In
their introduction, the editors say:

We use the term cultural
studies to refer to the classically humanistic disciplines which have
lately come to use their philosophical, literary, and historical
approaches to study the social construction of meaning, and other topics
traditionally of interest to symbolic interactionists.44

The sociological focus on the
social construction of identity and of meaning does sound something like
the project of a poststructuralist cultural studies. But the interest
in social constructionism, as in work in the symbolic interactionist tradition,
does not amount to the embrace of the radical re-thinking mandated by
poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory, which exposes the constitutive
role of culture and representation in the social world, as well as the
discursive nature of social categories themselves. In addition, the "identity"
understood in the Meadian tradition of symbolic interactionism is a socially
variable, but psychically fixed entity, whose coordinates are the traditional
sociological ones of social position and social role.

Although Jeffrey Alexander appropriates
the term "cultural studies" for sociology, his views on Birmingham cultural
studies are clearand totally dismissivein a review he co-wrote
in 1993 of the Cultural Studies reader which came out of the 1990
Illinois conference; actually, they are immediately clear in the
title of the review, which is "The British are Coming . . . Again!
The Hidden Agenda of 'Cultural Studies.'"45
Like the symbolic interactionists, Alexander uses the term "cultural studies"
to identify the type of sociological theory and sociological analysis
he proposes.46 In 1988, he
edited a book entitled Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies.
The book is premised on an argument spelled out in his introduction, namely
that the later work of Durkheimespecially his work on religionprovides
an excellent model for contemporary sociology, given its primary focus
on symbolic process. (Durkheim is, of course, primarily perceived as the
sociologist who stressed "social facts," and those features of social
life that are "external" to social actors; in the usual schematic history
of classical sociology, he is contrasted in this with Max Weber, the begetter
of "interpretative" sociology, with its focus on meaning and its methodology
of Verstehen.) Alexander claims that Durkheim turned to the study
of religion "because he wanted to give cultural processes more theoretical
autonomy."47 He suggests that
there are parallels with the work of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes,
and Foucault, and that in some cases this is more than coincidence, but
rather the unacknowledged influence of Durkheim. He goes on to review
the work of certain sociologists, and some anthropologists, who have pursued
Durkheim's later theory (Edward Shils, Robert Bellah, Victor Turner, Mary
Douglas,) and he outlines a project for a late-Durkheimian sociology,
which he calls "cultural studies." But, despite the names of structuralist
and poststructuralist writers, this project is innocent of some of central
theoretical insights of those writers. This is Alexander's formulation
of such a sociology:

[T]he major point of departure
is The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, which functions
as a model for explaining central processes in secular social life.
The other shared emphases follow naturally from this. They concentrate,
first, on what might be called motivated expressive behavior as compared
with conscious strategic action. This emotionally charged action, moreover,
is not seen psychologistically, but instead as the basis for ritualization.
It is conceived as action organized by reference to symbolic patterns
that actorseven if they have a hand in changing themdid
not intentionally create.48

His own chapter in the book is
on Watergate and Durkheimian sociology, and he summarizes it thus:

Using Weber and Parsons, I
try to connect Durkheim's later ideas to a broader theory of social
structure. Rituals, I suggest, are simultaneously effects and causes
of social crises; they open these liminal periods to symbolic and moral
issues of the most profound kind.49

The vocabulary here"motivated
expressive behavior," "the basis for ritualization," "action organized
by reference to symbolic patterns," "effects and causes"reveals,
I think, a fundamental conception of culture and society that is at the
same time humanist, potentially mechanistic, and grounded in the sort
of "layered" model of the social world which the crudest notions of base
and superstructure once gave rise to (though I should add that Alexander's
hostility to Marxism is at least as energetic as his hostility to cultural
studies and poststructuralist theory). In fact, some of the essays in
the book are both interesting and quite sophisticated.50
But Alexander's theoretical formulae, and his conception of sociology
as cultural studies, continues to operate with an understanding of discrete
layersthe social/institutional, and the cultural/symbolic. This
is not quite culture-as-tool kit (and in fact, in the Durkheim book, he
briefly criticizes Swidler's article) but it is not far removed from it
in the end.

Sociology and Cultural Studies

I have spent some time discussing
what has been called 'the cultural turn' in sociology to try to identify
the grounds for a possible rapprochement with cultural studies, which,
as I argued earlier, needs to work within a sociological perspective.
I have pointed out that the sociology of culture (the study of
the arts) has, for the most part, little interest in the critical revision
of its categories of analysis. Cultural sociology, or sociological theory
which foregrounds culture, on the other hand, claims both to preempt cultural
studies and to improve on it. This applies to both symbolic interactionism
and late-Durkheimianism. But in doing so, it retains the fatal weaknesses
produced by ignoring a central aspect of cultural studies, namely a theory
of representation. As Steven Seidman has put it, "American sociology,
even today, has not made a semiotic turn."51
And, in the words of Roger Silverstone, a British media studies scholar,
"the sociology of culture still finds comfort in the modernist securities
of classification both of approach and subject matter."52
This means, amongst other things, that sociologists, while understanding
the social construction of meaning and even of the social self, retain
a concept of the subject as coherent, unified and stable. It also means
(and this is a point made by Seidman) that they renounce the moral-critical
role of cultural studies, maintaining the traditional social-scientific
conception of the scholar as objective and value-neutral. And, of course,
it means that sociologists cannot (yet) grasp the discursive nature of
social relations and institutions. Obviously sociology, even after the
"cultural turn," will not do as a model for cultural studies.

In the context of this disciplinary
intransigence, I base my hope for a growing dialogue between sociology
and cultural studies (and between sociology and visual studies) on two
things: first, what seems to me to be an increasing acknowledgement within
cultural studies of the importance of ethnography, of the study of social
processes and institutions, and of the understanding of those structural
features of cultural life that the sociological imagination has the ability
to illuminate; and second, the work of some sociologists, small in number
and marginalized though they might be, who have extended their view and
their conceptual frameworks into new engagements with critical theory.
I am not asking literary critics or art historians to become sociologists,
nor, for that matter, sociologists to become cultural studies scholars.
We will continue to have discipline-based interests and discipline-based
training. But cultural studies, after all, has always been the cross-disciplinary
collaboration of interested scholars, and the body of work produced within
that field is the product of those intellectual exchanges and influences.
By now it is a cliché to say that cultural studies is not one thingeven
that it cannot be defined. Stuart Hall, director of the Birmingham Centre
throughout the decade of the 1970s, and still a major figure in the field,
has said this,53 as have the
editors of various volumes of essays on cultural studies.54
The major reason for this is that it is in the nature of cultural studies
to proceed in symbiotic relationship with other disciplines. (I leave
aside the question of whether or not cultural studies can itself be called
a discipline.) And that relationship is, and has always been, an ad hoc
affair. The particular configuration of scholars involved and, hence,
disciplines represented in the multiple sites of cultural studies work
has never, as far as I know, been a matter of planning, designing, and
hiring. Rather, just as was the case in Birmingham in 1964, it is the
product of a group of people, with a shared interest in culture (though
not necessarily a shared idea of what they mean by 'culture') beginning
to meet, to discuss each other's work, to mount seminars and conferences
and then, with any luck, to achieve the institutionalization of their
collaborative practice in centers, programs, and teaching. Throughout
the 1970s, as cultural studies programs were started in the United Kingdom
(usually in polytechnics rather than universities), what was really striking
was the great variety of intellectual combinations that emerged: literary
criticism and sociology; psychology, linguistics and communication theory;
literature, history and media studies. I know rather less about the 1980s
spread of cultural studies in this country, though it seems to me that
a good deal of American cultural studies has been a more intra-disciplinary,
literary-studies affair. Here too, though, there have been new initiatives
in which cross-disciplinary collaborations have become common.

This serendipitous nature
of cultural studies, which I see as nothing but a great advantage, means
it continues to be an open venture. My hope, then, is that sociologists
will increasingly participate in its conversations. Historians and anthropologists
are already part of the collective project (including here at Rochester),
but to date sociologists have, for the most part, refrained from taking
part.55 At the risk of sounding
as though I am, after all, recommending a return to origins, I
would point out the productive collaborations in Birmingham, which in
the early years and still now have included sociologists. (In fact, the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies a few years ago merged with the
Department of Sociology at that University.) In the United States, such
conversations would both guarantee the re-sociologizing of cultural studies
and ensure the long-overdue theoretical development of sociology.

Thanks to Douglas Crimp, Michael Holly,
Paul Jones, Keith Moxey and Tony King for comments on an earlier draft
of this paper.

8. The term is used, for
example, by Steven Seidman, "Relativizing Sociology: The Challenge
of Cultural Studies," in From Sociology to Cultural Studies: New
Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Long (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 37-61.
Quotation from p. 41.

10. Cary Nelson, "Always
Already Cultural Studies: Two Conferences and a Manifesto," The
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 14 (Spring 1991):
24-38. Nelson describes this work as a "recycled" semiotics,
which he equates with textualism; however, as Keith Moxey has pointed
out, however, semiotics at its best is not merely a "textual"
enterprise: "Semiotics and the Social History of Art," New
Literary History 22 (Autumn 1991): 985-999.

11. Donna Haraway, "Teddy
Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,"
reprinted in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World
of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26-58.

12. Michael Schudson,
"Cultural Studies and the Social Construction of 'Social Construction:'
Notes on 'Teddy Bear Patriarchy,'" in Long, 379-398.

18. See also Victor Burgin's
introduction to In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1-36. Burgin reviews
the development of cultural studies in Britain, and addresses in particular
the turn to semiotics and psychoanalysis by those in the field.

20. Two examples of such
an exchange were Michael Kennedy's response to a paper by Russell Jacoby,
and Judith Stacey's response to a paper by Michèle Lamont, the
respondent in each case challenging more traditional models of social
analysis.

21. John E. Toews, "Intellectual
History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility
of Experience," The American Historical Review 92 (October
1987): 879-907. Although the article was published some time ago, Toews's
invited participation at the conference indicated a new openness among
some social scientists to a certain rapprochement with critical trends
in the humanities.

23. Taken from the Web
site for the conference at the time: culture.html at www.sscf.ucsb.edu.
I should say that I didn't attend the conference, and am guessing the
nature of the papers given on the basis of their titles and of the speakers'
published works.

27. "The Production
of Culture" special issue of American Behavioral Scientist
19 (July/August 1976) (re-published that year by Sage Publications Ltd.,
edited by Richard A. Peterseon) and "The Production of Culture"
special issue of Social Research, 45 (Summer 1978).

34. Paul DiMaggio, "Are
Art-museum Visitors Different from Other People? The Relationship between
Attendance and Social and Political Attitudes in the United States,"
in Poetics 24 (November 1996), 161.

35. Diane Crane, "Introduction:
The Challenge of the Sociology of Culture to Sociology as a Discipline,"
in Crane, 1-20. Quotation from p. 5.

37. Ann Swidler, :Culture
in Action: Symbols and Strategies," American Sociological Review
15 (April 1986): 273-286. I should note that sociologists like Crane and
Swidler, and others committed to versions of "qualitative" sociology,
would certainly object to accusations of positivism. But my point is that
scientistic methodologies can prevail whatever is being studied,
meanings as much as observed behavior.

38. Diana Crane, "Culture
Syllabi and the Sociology of Culture: What Do Syllabi Tell Us?" Newletter
of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association
10 (Winter 1996): 1, 6-8. Quotation from p. 7.

39. Indeed, one session
at the 1997 ASA meetings was devoted to reviews of the "return to
culture" in a number of sub-specializations, under the general panel
heading "The Return to Culture in American Sociology."

40. Herman Gray also
makes this point, in passing: "Professional mainstream theorists
strongly identified with specialties like social theory and the sociology
of culture hold fast to the claim that sociology long ago dealt with the
issues and questions that now appear under the sign of cultural studies."
Herman Gray: "Is Cultural Studies Inflated? The Cultural Economy
of Cultural Studies in the United States," in Disciplinarity and
Dissent in Cultural Studies, ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar
Gaonkar (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 203-216. Quotation is
from p. 210.

41. Michele Lamont, "Crisis
or No Crisis: Culture and Theory in SociologyThe Humanities and
Elsewhere," Newsletter of the Sociology of Culture Section of
the American Sociological Association 6 (Spring 1992): 8-9. Quotation
on p. 8, my italics.

46. He uses the term
interchangeably, and therefore confusingly, with the term "cultural
sociology." See Jeffrey C. Alexander, "Cultural Sociology or
Sociology of Culture? Towards a Strong Program," Newsletter of
the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association
10 (Spring-Summer 1996): 1, 3-5.

50. For example, Eric
Rothenbulher's study of mass strikes as ritual and interpretation, whose
discussion of the symbolic meaning of such conflict has quite a bit in
common with Birmingham work on subculture. Eric Rothenbulher, "The
Liminal Fight: Mass Strikes as Ritual and Interpretation," in Alexander,
Durkheimian Sociology, 66-90.

52. Roger Silverstone,
"The Power of the Ordinary: On Cultural Studies and the Sociology
of Culture," Sociology 28, (November 1994): 991-1001. Quotation
on p.993.

53. "Cultural studies
has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. . . .
It included many different kinds of work." Stuart Hall, "Cultural
Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies," in Cultural Studies,
ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge,
1992), 277-286. Quotation from p. 278. Also: "Cultural studies is
not one thing; it has never been one thing." Stuart Hall, "The
Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities,"
October 53, (1990): 11-90. Quotation from p. 11.

54. For example: "[I]t
is probably impossible to agree on any essential definition or unique
narrative of cultural studies." Grossberg et al., 3.

55. The University of
California, Santa Barbara, is one exception to this generalization.